WWII Pilot Found Buried in Italian Corn Field

The remains of an Italian WWII pilot who died in a dogfight with U.S. pilots 70 years ago have finally been unearthed -- still sitting on the parachute in the cockpit.

Found 13 feet underground with the wreckage of his crashed plane, a Macchi C.205 Veltro, the pilot was identified as being Lieutenant Guerrino Bortolani. His plane literately disappeared in the Padua countryside in northern Italy, planting itself deep in the bank of a ditch as it crashed on March 11, 1944.

"The crash site is now a corn field. We were able to find the remains with the help of an elderly man, who on that day witnessed the fighter going into a nosedive and hit the ground," Alessandro Voltolina, of the Romagna Air Finders, a group of wreck hunters from Ravenna, told Discovery News.